1995 article assures you: the internet will not replace your newspapers and shopping mall.

(via robot-heart-politics)

How about electronic publishing? Try reading a book on disc. At best, it’s an unpleasant chore: the myopic glow of a clunky computer replaces the friendly pages of a book. And you can’t tote that laptop to the beach. Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we’ll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure.

What the Internet hucksters won’t tell you is tht the Internet is one big ocean of unedited data, without any pretense of completeness. Lacking editors, reviewers or critics, the Internet has become a wasteland of unfiltered data. You don’t know what to ignore and what’s worth reading. Logged onto the World Wide Web, I hunt for the date of the Battle of Trafalgar. Hundreds of files show up, and it takes 15 minutes to unravel them—one’s a biography written by an eighth grader, the second is a computer game that doesn’t work and the third is an image of a London monument. None answers my question, and my search is periodically interrupted by messages like, “Too many connections, try again later.”

Won’t the Internet be useful in governing? Internet addicts clamor for government reports. But when Andy Spano ran for county executive in Westchester County, N.Y., he put every press release and position paper onto a bulletin board. In that affluent county, with plenty of computer companies, how many voters logged in? Fewer than 30. Not a good omen…

Then there’s cyberbusiness. We’re promised instant catalog shopping—just point and click for great deals. We’ll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obselete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet—which there isn’t—the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople.

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  1. higgitusfiggitus reblogged this from cabaaal and added:
    …did I really just read the word “huckster”? WHAT THE HELL IS A HUCKSTER? I suppose I’m relieved, though. My great aunt...
  2. dreamiermaalik reblogged this from nowisgreater
  3. newbleu reblogged this from robot-heart-politics and added:
    Oh man I’m so sick of hearing about this internet.
  4. queenabaddon reblogged this from robot-heart-politics and added:
    Oh god, lol. I bet he feels like an asshat right now.
  5. etrubyroux reblogged this from robot-heart-politics
  6. ysabet reblogged this from nowisgreater
  7. spaceshipmatria reblogged this from guerrillamamamedicine and added:
    The article provides some very lulzy moments (especially with regard to the author’s disbelief that online shopping...
  8. wildunicornherd reblogged this from guerrillamamamedicine and added:
    The funniest thing about the article, to me, is that it’s “Usenet’, not “the Usenet”, which is the most glaring sign...
  9. guerrillamamamedicine reblogged this from so-treu
  10. rhivolution reblogged this from nowisgreater and added:
    The myopic view of the mid-90s tech writer, more like. (pls note: I am badly myopic myself—literally—and simply being...
  11. divide-by-zero reblogged this from blehmeng and added:
    Oh wow. Just goes to show how the world changes. Imagine where we’ll be in another 10 years… Crazy.
  12. blehmeng reblogged this from thatscurious and added:
    Meeeeemmmorieeeeeeeeeeesssss
  13. thatscurious reblogged this from robot-heart-politics and added:
    This is very funny. You’ve got to feel sorry for writers like this. In 1995 it was hard to imagine the sheer speed that...
  14. treatyoselfartie reblogged this from silas216
  15. memorymuseum reblogged this from robot-heart-politics
  16. themoderatelyambitiousscientist reblogged this from robot-heart-politics and added:
    Don’t worry everyone- the internet will not take over! No one will want to shop online!
  17. This was featured in #Science
  18. robot-heart-politics posted this

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